Abstract:

This thesis presents the results of two studies that investigate the question of what interruption-styles
are most appropriate for end-user programmers who are debugging programs. In the
studies, end-user programmers are presented with surprises that encourage them to investigate,
use, and learn about debugging devices in their programming environment. We used various
interruption-styles to present these surprises to the end-user programmers, and we evaluated how
they affected the end-user programmers ability to learn about the debugging features, their
accuracy at debugging their programs, and how accurate they were at judging how well they had
debugged their programs. The three styles we compared were immediate-style interruptions
(which force the user to acknowledge them), low-intensity negotiated-style interruptions (which
do not force the user to acknowledge them, but rather use visual elements such as red circles
around cell values in order to notify users that there is something for them to do), and high-intensity
negotiated-style interruptions (which are the same as low-intensity negotiated-style
interruptions except that the visual elements are more intense, e.g. they are larger and they blink).
We found that low-intensity negotiated-style interruptions best supported end-user programmers
debugging, learning, and self-assessment. We also found that immediate-style and high-intensity
negotiated-style interruptions had very similar effects on the end-user programmers.